Outside of hackernews, most people could care less. So many non-tech twitter users I have talked to, don't even know Musk bought it.
Why would they know/care to move, as you say.
In that sense, this does make a dent.
Still, without config/model weights, etc. it's not worth that much.
Whatever it is it won't be federated though.. except maybe as a small side feature "normies" dont know about.
The obsolute worst thing about the Fediverse (Mastodon et al) right now is the onboarding process. You have to "chose an instance" before you can even start understanding what that's about - and if you chose wrong you might find your instance gets switched off leaving you high and dry in the future.
Now imagine Tumblr ships ActivityPub. Every Tumblr user can now follow any Mastodon user, and vice-versa. The Tumblr ecosystem gets a whole bunch of new high quality available content. Mastodon enthusiasts can tell their skeptical friends "go sign up for a Tumblr account and follow me from that".
Or... if you're launching something new, why would you launch from a state of zero accounts when you could launch with Fediverse compatibility and have ~10m accounts that your first users can start following straight away?
I'd rather build something new and actually have a userbase than be something akin to a subreddit with fleeting users. It will be a lot more hard work, but it's worth it.
Also, Mastodon sucks. This whole "let's be free together" but also "don't step out of line" culture is disgusting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28495086.
> The obsolute worst thing about the Fediverse (Mastodon et al) right now is the onboarding process. You have to "chose an instance" before you can even start understanding what that's about - and if you chose wrong you might find your instance gets switched off leaving you high and dry in the future.
That's the problem. It's unnecessarily complex and other than a subniche, people in the real world are not interested in it. They just don't care about this at all.
Wouldn't it be better and simpler to just revert that trend to how it was before the big tech behemoths put everything behind walled gardens?
That's... kind of the point of the fediverse? A decentralized network built on non-proprietary software makes walled gardens and centralization by corporations infeasible. Identity is controlled by the end user.
It brings me back a few years ago where everyone just had to use blockchains instead of... a database, when it made no sense. It should be decentralization in the sense of offer, not technical decentralization.
Mastodon and the like feel flat to me. Again, maybe I'm missing a key piece here.
> A decentralized network built on non-proprietary software makes walled gardens and centralization by corporations infeasible
I don't think so. I don't think any of this will gather enough momentum to make a dent to the established networks (Twitter, FB, TikTok, Reddit, etc). That ship has sailed, imho
On the other hand, I have no reason to assume Twitter will die. What trust are we talking about here? I have no idea. People will just continue using it. In fact, I vastly prefer what's happening now than what the last management was doing.
Not trying to be confrontational here. I'm trusting my gut feeling more because I've seen through so many things that range from delusions to failed ideas in the last decade: Theranos, WeWork, Metaverse, Clubhouse, Crypto [other than Bitcoin], Social networks pretending to be the arbiters of truth, etc. I have a strong BS detector.